[ros-dev] ReactOS UI Team - Concept, Plan, and: help wanted

Maritn "E.T." Misuth et_ros at ethome.sk
Wed Oct 12 11:17:55 CEST 2005


Just a stupid idea,

why not fully Mozilla's embrace XPUI ( maybe with some micro aditions)
and use it for everythnig GUI related?

I mean, if I got it right from what I was reading, XPUI is XML system
for describing GUI layout and is binded to C++ code which forms
application. This way application programmer is fully shielded from
programming UI's and inversely UI designer can design almost anything
without the need to recompile the whole stuff. This allows to change
UI's really quickly and test several concepts without even changing the
actual code in app. Try opening FireFox AboutBox within browser tab
using chrome:\\ url or even try to open the browser window with
menubars, tabs and everything within itself, and you'll get what I mean.
Gecko is said to be fast so this shouldn't be a problem. Possiblities to
completely change UIs are then endless and can be done relatively
quickly and I bet that even those theme wankers would be happy with
something like that. Even twisted M$ is going to use some XML crap for
their GUI description system and I bet sooner or later Linux and the
rest of the world will follow (if it already there isn't some own work
like that). XPUI is there, I know it might not be the best XML UI
solution, but it is open source and already present, so I was thinking
it might be good idea. Anyone who has some background in html and
javascript can extend such resources, plus icons can be PNG's which are
really portable. Sure the apps might get bigger but some can get
smaller, and with todays HDD's this shouldn't be a problem. And mainly,
once such XPUI port will be done, FireFox for ReactOS download could be
made, propably, smaller because that XPUI library would be core part of
the system ;)...

You know my dream is having cool HW openGL accelerated XML based Windows
Classic like UI with SVG icons, which is pure utopia as I, myself, am
not able to code such a thing ;)) (but I dream and hope that someone
will) :)

And remember this is just stupid idea.
 
E.T.



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